‘LIBYA SLAVE AUCTIONS’: UPDATING OUR ‘STOP THE MAANGAMIZI!’ RESPONSE

“To be a slave was to be a human being under conditions in which that humanity was denied.They were not slaves. They were [Afrikan] people. Their condition was slavery. They looked upon themselves and their servitude with the eyes and minds of human beings, conscious of all that went on around them”.Julius Lester

“Most human behaviour is controlled by images. Image is a factor in how people look at themselves and what they use to reflect themselves. The control of images is a major factor in world power”John Henrik Clarke

“Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.”John Henrik Clarke

They say silence speaks louder than words; in what has been perceived to be our silence, we have also been speaking volumes. It is not that we have not been responding, it is simply that some are looking for us to respond in typical sorts of ways. We in the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Campaign (SMWeCGEC) do not pander to obscurantism, more so with misguiding populist decorations. Our priority focus is on educating, organising and mobilising people to ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ through their own reparatory justice action-learning in order to build their own power to effect holistic reparatory justice. This is why we concur with Dr John Henrik Clarke as quoted above. What is happening in and around Libya is more than enslaved Afrikans being sold on auction blocks. Rather, this is one of the symptoms of an increasingly decadent, rotten and stinking neocolonialism as being perpetuated in Afrika by the Global Apartheid racist forces of Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism which is making our own homeland terribly more impossible to live in. If our own countries have not become hell on earth why wouldn’t Afrikans want to stay in Afrika?

Some people are making lots of noise and taking sporadically reactive actions about Afrikans being sold on auction blocks in Libya. It is not lost upon us that some of these noises and actions are being orchestrated and paid for from dodgy sources inimical to the best interests of Afrika. As justified in their spontaneity as some of such actions may appear, they raise lots more questions than answers. After these sorts of protests that we are seeing being organised in response largely to the imperialist corporate mouthpiece CNN reporting and dissemination of ‘controlling images’ of Afrikans being sold on auction-blocs, what do most of the participants who attend such protests, (including those who simply do so simply because they are paid bogus NGO bureaucrats and poverty-pimps, whose job it is to orchestrate and profit from such wild-goose chases), do as follow-up actions of every-day resistance to effect change in eradicating the root causes of such horrors? How long shall we continue to run helter-skelter in spontaneous protests actions, without taking effectively organised actions to prevent the killing of our freedom-fighting prophets and the violent destruction of the movements of resistance they have been trying to build? It would seem that there are some in our Afrikan Heritage Communities that seek to limit our activism to aimless protests, outside of the context of movement-building, with no clear goals or agreement on who should be the targets of our actions, the change we are seeking to bring about and no plan to build principled organizational unity or the capacity to facilitate such potentially change-making endeavours.

Why are those concerned not crying out and protesting louder about the mess being made of our Afrikan homeland by Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism through its neocolonial Afrikan and Arab elitist puppets; the stinking mess with all the brutalities of white-supremacy racist barbarism that is driving ordinary Afrikans away from their homes? Please be more critically aware, discerning and vigilant. Take the kind of well-planned ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ for Reparatory Justice! action/s that will prevent Afrikans from fleeing our own homeland in the first place and vacating it for more foreign setter-colonialists to move in, racially cleanse and occupy for nefarious geopolitical ends. It is high time that our people once again focused on the kinds of systematic actions that will effect systemic change and not simply respond in knee-jerk fashion to the various symptoms of the same system in such a way that these symptoms become the main focus of our protest actions.

A more useful starting point would be to target Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism and its agencies, institutions and quislings, including their Black puppets of neocolonialism, that are masterminding such horrific crimes of the Maangamizi; particularly with a view to shutting down the Maangamizi Crime Scenes that you can find anywhere near you or close to communities you can be engaged constructively with. For people in Afrika ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ is not just a slogan, it is a life and death matter, hence why we initiated the SMWeCGEC with specific aims and objectives towards stopping the Maangamzi which manifests itself in the current system of neocolonialism with symptoms including variations of ‘modern-day slavery’, such as is becoming more highlighted currently in Libya. In our justified outrage about this form of modern-day enslavement of Afrikans, we must be mindful of who is pushing and profiting from this particular narrative and proliferation of ‘slave-auction controlling images’ and whose agenda is our people’s very predictable-spontaneous reactions to such narratives serving? It is indeed the same forces today as was the case yesteryear. After all, those that are most pushing the ‘modern day-slavery’ agenda and ‘it is Afrikans that are at it again‘ agenda are those actually responsible for creating, fuelling and perpetuating those conditions which continue to make it possible, including violently killing those freedom-fighters of ours who organise and build movements so stop such manifestations of the Maangamizi.

How comes this was not occurring under a Colonel Gaddafi led-Libya? Modern-day enslavement of Afrikans in Libya, in this aggravated form, is happening because NATO forces deliberately have chosen to make it happen in order to lend credence to their governments propaganda about us forgetting our intergenerational reparatory justice demands and rather begging them to clean up the Euro-Amerikkkan ‘mess’ they have created in Libya; and save us from horrors they contrive all the time in different ways and means. After all, isn’t Libya and its current neocolonial puppet-government a territory that is absolutely controlled in military and all other forms by the same forces of Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism and their creation of reactionary counterinsurgency terrorist forces like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State?

We must not allow ourselves to fall into the Hegelian Dialectic i.e. Roman Emperor Diocletian’s age-old problem-reaction-solution method for securing geopolitical interests. This highlighting of the modern-enslavement of Afrikans in Libya, divorced from the context and continuum of the Maangamizi, is an attempt by the Euro-Amerikkkan imperialist Establishment to assert its geopolitical interests in Afrika and to shift and misdirect the masses attention away from the task of every-day resistance movement building for Pan-Afrikan Power through effecting Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice by our own People’s Power.

Directing our protests at forces which right now have no interests in stopping the trafficking, incarceration and enslavement of Afrikans in Libya is the classic way we give up our own change-making power by thinking that ‘WE THE AFRIKAN PEOPLE’ do not have the power to set our own agenda and organise to achieve it. Our time, and difficult to harness resources, are better utilised in self-determinedly organising according to our own Pan-Afrikan Liberation agenda to put a full-stop to the Maangamizi in the process of effecting holistic reparatory justice by our own people’s power; a global force those of us in the Diaspora have the responsibility first and foremost, to develop through building Afrikan Heritage Communities for National Self-Determination (AHC’s NSDs/Maatubuntujamaas) to organically generate the MAATUBUNTUMANDLAPan-Afrikan Government of Peoples Power Abroad which in our contemporary times will be the most effective way to uphold, defend and promote the best collective geo-political interests of Afrikan people throughout the World.

What is happening now in Libya and the disgraceful inability of governments and other state officials throughout the Continent and Diaspora of Afrika to do anything effective in addressing the situation makes it more imperative for Afrikans, outside of the Continent of Afrika, to prioritise the building of such MAATUBUNTUMANDLA as a step towards achieving MAATUBUNTUMAN (Pan-Afrikan Union of Communities at Home & Abroad); so that we are able to not only ‘substantively’ represent’ ourselves in positive action to make our Afrikan Lives actually matter in deed; but also amplify the voices of our Communities of Resistance on the Continent and support them in freedom-fighting actions that will enable them to stop such crimes of the Maangamizi upon their own initiatives. This is how best we in our time can fulfil our ‘mission’ and not betray it, as others have and are still doing, so as to win and guarantee our collective security and thereby provide a brighter future for us and our progeny on Planet Earth.

04/12/17 revised from original statement of Kofi Mawuli Klu on 28/11/17

“The neo-colonialism of today represents imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage. In the past it was possible to convert a country upon which a neo-colonial regime had been imposed — Egypt in the nineteenth century is an example — into a colonial territory. Today this process is no longer feasible. Old-fashioned colonialism is by no means entirely abolished. It still constitutes an African problem, but it is everywhere on the retreat. Once a territory has become nominally independent it is no longer possible, as it was in the last century, to reverse the process. Existing colonies may linger on, but no new colonies will be created. In place of colonialism as the main instrument of imperialism we have today neo-colonialism. The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, ‘Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism’

“Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it”George Santayana